Free The Submission by Amy Waldman

translated into an Indian American, albeit a Hindu one, runninghis old investment bank. Khan’s father, according to the report, was a senior engineer at Verizon, his mother an artist who taught at a local community college. They had bought their house in 1973 and owed $60,000 on their mortgage. Khan himself owned no property; he lived in Chinatown, which struck Paul, the uptowner, as an odd place for an Indian American. He had no criminal record, no lawsuits pending against him, no tax liens.
    The website of a mosque in Arlington, Virginia, recorded two donations from Khan’s father, Salman, both made after the attack; this, along with inquiries to the mosque as well as the family’s neighbors and colleagues, had confirmed that the family was, indeed, Muslim.
    The mosque, which had opened in 1970 and moved to its current building in 1995, had “no known radical ties,” although the cousin of the son of one former board member had gone to school with some Virginia youths recently accused of training for terror through paint-ball games (“I used to see them hanging out in the parking lot,” this cousin had told
The Washington Post
)
.
Sixteen, not six, degrees of separation.
    On ROI’s behalf, Khan had made a trip to Afghanistan earlier in the year, but he had no known or identifiable link to any organization on the terrorist watch list. He had made no political contributions to fringe candidates or, for that matter, to mainstream ones. His only membership appeared to be in the American Institute of Architects. There was nothing to suggest he was an extremist. Anything but: he seemed all-American, even in his ambition.
    Paul took out a yellow legal pad, his favorite reasoning tool, and set it on the desk before him. He drew a line down the middle and titled the columns “For Khan” and “Against Khan.” There were in life rarely, if ever, “right” decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances. It came down to weighing the predictable consequences of each choice, and trying to foresee the unpredictable—those remote contingencies.
    In Khan’s favor he wrote:
    principle—he won!
    statement of tolerance
    appeal of design
    jurors—resistance: Claire
    reporter has—story out?
    From that last entry, he drew a line to the “Against” column and wrote “Fred,” who served to neutralize the reporter. Paul was grateful for the hierarchy of newspapers, even as he knew it was giving way to the democracy, or rather, anarchy, of blogs and the Internet. For now, at least, reporters still answered to editors who controlled their jobs.
    But though he had dammed the leak, another could open, a threat that called for swift and decisive action. No gain in too much reflection. In the “Against” column, his pen scratched vigorously:
    backlash
    Distraction
    families divided
    raising $$$ harder
    governor/politics
    It was unlikely that the governor, whose national ambitions dangled like a watch chain, would take a stand for a Muslim now. He kept on. Opposite “statement of tolerance,” he wrote:
    statement of appeasement/weakness
    Under both columns, with the heading “Unpredictable,” he wrote:
    VIOLENCE
    From the legal pad, he took a visual tally. The arguments for Khan looked paltry, not just in number, as if the “For” column had beenwritten in paler ink. Perhaps “principle—he won!” should have ended the argument before it began, but Paul’s job was to get a memorial built, and he wouldn’t sacrifice that goal for a man named Mohammad.
    So the decision was clear, the mechanism for killing Khan’s design less so. Their only choice was to pronounce Khan unsuitable, but on what grounds? Paul looked up “unsuitable” in the dictionary: “Not appropriate.” He looked up “appropriate”: “Suitable for a particular person, condition, occasion, or place; fitting.” He looked up “fitting”: “Being in keeping with a situation; appropriate.” This was why he was a